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5/19/2009

A Few Readings around the Web

1. China Digital Times is on our RSS feed, and, hopefully, on yours too—it is one of the essential places where English-language readers can find easily accessible updates of what is happening in China and in the Chinese media and blogosphere. CNReviews has posted an interview with CDT’s Sophie Beach that gives further details about the site’s management and goals.

2. In the interview, Beach also mentions her own website (好妈妈) on raising bilingual children, chockfull of information and references for those who are interested. At Hao Mama, Beach references Anna Greenspan’s website, Waking Giants, on Greenspan’s experiences sending her son to local school in Shanghai. We linked to Waking Giants when it first launched (Greenspan contributed a piece on the melamine scandal to the China Beat-based book, China in 2008), but the blog has grown since then, including interesting posts on the growing cult for the 2010 Expo mascot, Haibao.

3. For a one-stop shop of interesting pieces on China, check out this page at The Guardian for a week-long feature called “China at the Crossroads” (十字路口的中国). The Guardian has also launched a Chinese version, featuring a selection of its articles. For more about this service (done by volunteer translators at Yeeyan), see here.

4. The USC’s US-China Institute hosts US-China Today, a website we’ve been checking in with regularly for its quality content on a variety of China-related subjects. As examples, check out features stories “From Gold Farmers to Kings: Online Gaming in China” by Steven Jefferson and Peter Winter or “Missionaries of Sound” on Chinese hip-hop by Jonathan Hwang (full disclosure: Hwang is a UCI undergrad and studies with China Beat’s Jeff Wasserstrom). Many of the contributors to US-China Today are undergraduates and graduate students.

5. There have been a number of memorials in the past week for the victims of last year’s earthquake. Given that a year ago, China Beat ran excerpts of letters from Peter Hessler’s former students, many of whom are now teachers themselves, we found this piece at Alec Ash’s blog (Six), particularly interesting. Written by a guest poster, Ash’s friend Katrina Hamlin, the post reflects on how Hamlin’s students in Chengdu have been processing the disaster.